Why I’m posting a bunch of YouTube videos.

If you’re a regular blog reader, you may have noticed that I haven’t exactly been a regular blog writer lately. Honestly, I’ve been busy.

First there was the yard sale that took two days to set up and two days to sit through. I’m still cleaning up the remains of that. Goodwill is doing very well with my repeated truck drive throughs. Lesson learned: sell items of value on Craig’s list and throw the rest away.

Then rain. Lots of rain. And with the rain, lots of flying. One morning I started at 5 AM. Another evening, I flew over cherry trees until 9 PM, went to the airport for fuel, and didn’t get home until 9:45 PM.

Then a four-day weekend in Leavenworth selling jewelry. Those are long days. Leavenworth is 40 miles from here and I’m gone at least 12 hours each day. When I get home after a day of dealing with tourist shoppers and summer heat, the last thing I want to do is sit in front of a computer to write.

And then there’s YouTube. You might recall my post about the FlyingMAir YouTube channel in late May? That’s when I discovered that one of my videos had gone viral and I was actually earning some real money as a content producer. But as anyone in publishing can tell you, you can’t just sit back and expect things to carry on without some additional effort. So I became motivated to build up the channel and see where I can take it.

It’s been about six weeks since that post and I’ve added a lot of new videos to the channel. Some are videos I’d published on my personal channel years ago; I moved them over where they’d get more attention. Others are brand new, created with newly recorded footage.

And it’s paying off. Yesterday my subscriber count topped 50,000. That viral video now has 9.3 million views. I am routinely getting more than 2,000 views in the first 24 hours of all the new videos I publish. And it’s showing in my YouTube earnings, too. Without getting too specific, let’s just say that I have my monthly living expenses covered for a while.

So when faced with the choice of editing and publishing a video that’ll be seen by thousands (or millions?) of people and put money in my bank account or writing a blog post that might be seen by a few hundred people without adding a thing to my bottom line, you can probably figure out which is my first choice.

Sorry.

But there is a silver lining. I’ve decided to blog the videos when they are published on YouTube. Today, I’m playing catch up, adding them to my blog with a post date to match the date they were publishing on YouTube. So if you’re a blog reader who doesn’t necessarily surf YouTube, you can see them on an ongoing basis.

And yes, I promise to finish my blog post series about my spring vacation on the David B. It might just take a while.